Vivae Mortis
by Krillia
Summary: Even for a homunculus, immortality is not a guarantee. Introspective ficlet for Envy, set years after the series ends. Spoilers for the end of the series, and knowledge of either episode 51 or the movie is probably necessary to comprehend it.


Death.

For years, for centuries, it had been a term that only peripherally related to him. It had existed as something that others, not like himself, were to become comfortably familiar with at the end of their miserable little lives. He, however, had been granted the privilege and gift of being able to circumvent it.

He had become used to being the one who brought about death, never quite worrying himself with the word, because it had always been something he was able to avoid. His weakness was easy to evade, and although there were matters over which he obsessed, Envy was able to stay away from those things that could have caused his demise. His obsessions never seemed to cross paths with his mortality.

Of course, it had been easy when he had been chained, bound to the other world and a few select individuals within it. Even his obsessions had fed him, the parallels and contrasts of his own desires to that of his mistress's creating the environment that was his very substance. But he had been torn, driven, and thrown from that world, by his own spontaneous design. There was no longer a need for his existence, and the result was that he no longer had the privilege of immortality.

With his revenge granted, and the only thing that had kept him bound to his mistress destroyed, he could only wait for the moment when Death shattered his empty husk and left it for the winds of time.

Around him, the plethora of those actually human, who believed themselves alone, died in droves. Some, by his hand. Those who stumbled upon him, staring at him with disbelieving eyes as he descended to sever the thread that tied them from their existance. They were unable to fathom that they had discovered something that lived on, in their pitiful lives, as only a memory in the collective unconscious. He never killed without first letting them see what it was that had stolen their last breath. It would have been unfair to them and an insult to him, to let them die thinking that it was a simple encounter with the wrong_ human_ on the street that had taken their lives from them. They had the honor of stumbling upon a demon. Perhaps a god. In this world, he could have been either. Possibly, both.

Such were his attempts to prove to those who dwelled in the dark alleys that he was more than they. The years had passed, and he was going to die. His immortality was being slowly ripped away from him, and he was completely alone as he was reminded that even he wasn't the god that he had once believed he could be. He had intended to rule the world. Now, he was only alone. The thing he most dreaded, and it had been thrust upon him. Sometimes, watching the darkness, he thought it was a punishment. Most of the time, it was only a bitter coincidence.

Perhaps it was the reminder of his own mortality. He could feel it, recently, ticking in his chest. He was no longer immortal, no longer close to the creature that he had once been. He was covered in scars, no longer able to heal as he once had. The scars themselves were reminders of what he had lost and what he could never regain. The portal to his immortality was lost to him, the pathway to the place that he might have once considered his home, the place where he was more than a nightmare, gone.

Now, he waited only to die. He would not seek it out, his death. He could not seek it out, because he would then have to face the thing he most feared. Humans at least had their happy beliefs that perhaps there was somewhere that they could go. But none of their beliefs had a home, a place, for him and all that he was. He was the monster. He was the one without a soul. The very thing that had once granted him his immortality was now his pathway to ultimate, unavoidable, irreversible destruction.

He was tired, and there was no place for him to rest, until the time when the final ichors of ambrosia, of immortality, drained from his veins. He would die as he had lived, embraced by shadows, while images of bloody death, this time his own, flashed before his eyes. Leaving him abandoned to a void that he wasn't able to fathom.


End file.
